[This is an English translation of a short report on the digital history workshop held on 7 January 2013 at the Huygens ING, as it appeared on the Dutch website Historici.nl. Full disclosure: I did not only write this report but also organized the workshop and gave the introductory lecture. More information on the workshop, including the slides of many presentations, biographies of the speakers and abstracts of the papers (several of them in English) can be found on the website: www.digitale-geschiedenis.nl.]

On 7 January 2013, the Royal Netherlands Historical Society (KNHG) and the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts & Sciences) organized a workshop on the theme of digital history. The aim of this well-attended workshop was to discuss the methodological and epistemological changes that are brought about in historical research as a result of new technologies and the availability of digitized sources. With discussants for every paper, and about 50 participants in total, time was clearly too short to deal with all questions that came to the fore.

It contains an article of mine called "Propaganda or fighting the myth of pakhdones? Naye Prese, the Popular Front, and the Spanish Civil War", discussing the engagement of Jewish migrant communists in Paris with the participation of Jewish volunteers in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War.

In 2008 I completed my Ph.D. thesis on Jewish volunteers who fought in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War. My thesis centered to a large extent around the Naftali Botwin company that consisted mostly of Yiddish-speaking Polish Jews (see my publications list to download some related articles).

Last April I was contacted by a young Spanish composer named Ignacio Fernandez Galindo. Working with several musicians, Galindo was in the process of creating a composition entitled Botwin. The resulting composition is a musical commemoration of Polish-Jewish participation in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War or, as it is called on the website of the Centro de Música Contemporánea Garaikideak with which Galindo is associated, "a tribute to the forgotten civil war". It includes two poems by the Polish-Jewish Yiddish poet Leib Olitzky (1894-1975) and the Polish poet and Nobel laureate Wislawa Szymborska (1923-2012).1

In this post I want to discuss the use of Drupal and Drupal distributions in academia, especially the humanities, where Drupal has become an increasingly popular CMS in recent years.

This has not always been the case. Traditionally, Wordpress has been a popular choice among humanists, especially for personal websites/blogs, and in humanities institutes in general, particularly for conference and project websites (see also my post on building a blog with Drupal here). Given its relatively easy learning curve, out-of-the-box functionality and general ease of use this is an understandable choice, if also a self-perpetuating one: given the scarce availability of resources in many humanities institutes, previous experience with a particular system is often a key criterion, even when other systems might suit a project's functional demands better.

When I decided to create this website the first question that came up was: which CMS will I use? I built a previous version with Wordpress which is pretty much ideal for a blog-oriented website. But as it happens I built several websites with Drupal already and I currently work as a web developer using Drupal Commons to create a major new website relating to Dutch history.

Since 2005 I maintain a website called Yiddish Sources which is a portal for anyone who is interested in Yiddish and Yiddish Studies. One of the side effects of maintaining this website is that it gives an insight into how the web is used, or can be used, to promote and share historical and cultural heritage online.

Recently, the new version of European History Primary Sources (EHPS) was launched. EHPS is an index of scholarly digital repositories that contain primary sources for the history of Europe. Hundreds of digital libraries, archives and born-digital sources are described and tagged by country, language, period, subject and type of source.